One Walk in Winter

by Georgia Beers

  Olivia seemed to have thoughts she didn’t want to share as she stood there and just looked at Hayley for a good ten seconds. Finally, she turned and introduced Hayley to Stephanie. “She’s our front desk manager. She knows pretty much everything about each guest, so if you have questions about special requirements or complaints or anything related to keeping our guests happy, you ask her.”

  Hayley shook Stephanie’s hand. There was something comforting about her demeanor, her friendly smile, the firm-but-not-too-firm handshake. Hayley liked her instantly.

  Olivia turned and went through a hidden door that took them behind the front desk and through another door. An office, nicely appointed for such a small space, led to another, much larger office. Olivia stopped in the doorway and held out an arm in half-hearted presentation.

  “This is your office.”

  “Wow,” Hayley said before she could stop herself. “This is nice.” She walked in, absorbing the size of it, the shelves that lined one wall, the huge desk that must have been cherry or mahogany or some other expensive wood. The surface was so polished, she could see her reflection in it. The chair was one of those black, ergonomically correct ones, and Hayley dropped into it with a happy exhale. “I could get used to this,” she muttered, locking her fingers behind her head and lifting her feet. She crossed her legs at the ankles and set them on the surface of the desk.

  Olivia’s eyes widened slightly before her face set back into that disapproving expression once again. She took a deep breath—Hayley could tell by the way her breasts rose, not that she was looking…okay, she totally was—and said, “I’ve scheduled a meeting for ten with all the department heads.”

  “How many departments are there?”

  The question seemed to surprise Olivia, who blinked several times before ticking her responses off on her fingers. “Front desk, kitchen, bar, housekeeping, grounds, maintenance and custodial, spa. We’re a small resort, but we run smoothly because of our staff. It’d be good for you to familiarize yourself.” Those gorgeous brown eyes ran over Hayley, and for a minute, she let herself think Olivia was checking her out. That joy was fleeting, though, once Olivia added, “You might want to take notes or something. I’ll come get you in a few minutes and we’ll head to the conference room.”

  With that, Olivia left her alone. She didn’t go far; Hayley could hear her milling about in the small office they’d walked through. Must be hers.

  Hayley took her feet off the desk and used them to slowly turn her chair in circles. The massive window behind her looked out over what must be the side of the building, a long expanse of lightly snow-covered land that led to some trees in the distance. To the left, she could make out some wrought iron fencing, the solid black of it popping against the white on the ground. Must be where the pool was. To the right, she could see part of the drive that led under the outdoor canopy where guests unloaded their cars and left them for the valet to deal with. She watched as a dark green Land Rover pulled up, then inched out of her sight.

  A ping sounded, announcing a text message. Hayley took her phone out of her pocket and glanced at the screen to see Guinevere’s name. With a sigh, she clicked the screen off and put the phone back in her pocket without responding.

  “God, what am I doing here?” she whispered to nobody. It wasn’t that she was clueless. Her family had owned and run more than a dozen resorts and hotels her entire life. Some were super high-end and only catered to the very rich. Others, like the Evergreen, were a bit lower on the wealthy guests scale but still considered part of the upper crust of hotels. So Hayley had a pretty good handle on how it all worked. She’d grown up in and out of these places. She could manage one. Run it. Of course she could. Right? She was pretty sure…

  It’s time for you to grow up, Hayley.

  Her father’s voice, annoyed with her as usual, echoed in her head.

  This is how you earn your money. You’re thirty years old now. I’m not going to just hand it over to you anymore. You need to work for it, just like your brothers.

  Ugh. Her half brothers. Her father would never in a million years consider himself sexist, but he was. All he talked about were her brothers. How successful they were. How proud he was of them. His boys! And they were good guys, Hayley had to admit. Jason was forty-five and Max was forty-seven, so there was a large age gap, but they were good guys, respectful men who loved her and she loved them.

  But she’d never measure up.

  Not the way her father wanted her to. It wasn’t that she didn’t have a head for business like her half brothers. She did, if she forced herself. But she didn’t love business the way her father and siblings did. She found it tedious and hard—not difficult hard but unmoving hard—and not at all how she wanted to spend her life.

  A knock on the doorjamb startled Hayley back to the present. “Ready?” Olivia stood there, looking slightly less disapproving, her expression now one of resignation.

  “Oh, um…” Hayley hadn’t done a thing but daydream for the—she glanced at her watch—past fifteen minutes. She hadn’t even bothered with the computer. She yanked a drawer open, then another, until she found a legal-size pad of paper and a pen, grabbed them triumphantly. “Yes!” she said with more exuberance than necessary. “Ready. Lead the way.”

  Olivia turned away, obviously unimpressed with her, and headed out of the offices.

  Hayley followed, feeling like she was being led to her execution.

  * * *

  Oh, my God, I can’t do this.

  Those words ran through Hayley’s head over and over again as the meeting wrapped up. She’d taken a crazy amount of notes, trying hard not to look as if she’d been scribbling feverishly like a madwoman in an attempt to learn everybody’s name, what department they ran, and what issues they were having—God, did everybody have an issue all the time?

  Olivia sat next to her during the meeting and, if Hayley was going to be honest, pretty much ran the thing. She called on each person, introduced them, and was fairly obvious about watching Hayley take notes. She didn’t seem at all surprised that Hayley was clearly in over her head.

  Hayley felt like she was drowning.

  Back in her office, Hayley dropped her pad onto the desk with a slap and collapsed into her chair as if it was impossible for her to stand up any longer. She glanced at the top sheet of the pad, which was filled with names and scribbles and sentence fragments and notes in the margins going up the sides of the paper. It was a mess. She tried to read through what she’d managed to jot down clearly enough to understand.

  Maintenance needed to hire two new people.

  Housekeeping needed three new vacuum cleaners, and one of the washing machines was on the fritz—and needed to be fixed by maintenance, which was shorthanded because it needed to hire two new people.

  The kitchen had hired extra staff to help with Thanksgiving dinner—“Oh, God, that’s next week,” Hayley muttered when she realized it—and Olivia had managed to help them make a shared schedule so that nobody worked the entire day except for the head chef, whose name was…Hayley scanned her chicken scratch…Tess?

  The front desk needed a new printer, and she had to fire a valet for stealing change out of people’s cars.

  The budget for next year was due the week before Christmas.

  Hayley swallowed, rifled through the sheets of paper again, and swallowed some more. Then she sat back in her chair and tried to breathe, to relax.

  Her father was pretty sure the Evergreen wasn’t worth keeping open. It was making a profit, but not much of one, and Hayley knew that. Which meant she also knew that he’d sent her there fully expecting her to fail miserably so he could close or sell off the resort and prove his point about her.

  Well. She wasn’t about to let that happen.

  “Hey, Olivia?” she called out to the smaller office.

  She appeared a few seconds later, leaned against the doorframe, and folded her arms across her chest, which Hayley was starting to see as her r
egular stance when it came to her. “Your phone has an intercom, you know.”

  Hayley blinked at her, then looked at the phone for the very first time. “Oh. Okay. Sorry.”

  “Did you need something?”

  “Yeah.” Hayley cleared her throat, not liking the way Olivia made her nervous. “When did the previous manager leave?”

  “Roger? About six months ago. Why?”

  “Really? That long? Who’s been doing his job while waiting for me to arrive?”

  Olivia waited a beat before answering, which Hayley found interesting. “I have. Just like I did the whole time he was here.” With that, she turned and went back to her own desk.

  “Oh,” Hayley said softly, drawing out the word as she stared at the now-empty doorway.

  * * *

  At the front desk, Olivia typed in some information, then scanned the screen. There it was. H. Boyd had reserved the last remaining penthouse suite a week before and had checked in last night.

  “Do you think Corporate knows she’s taking up a room?” she said under her breath, but loudly enough for Stephanie to hear her. “Not just a room. A penthouse suite.”

  “No idea,” Stephanie replied, her voice just as low. “But she did mention she was paying for it. And she did enter a credit card.” She pointed to the screen.

  “Yeah.” Stephanie was right. While it wasn’t cool that Hayley was taking up a room that could be sold to a customer, it was still being paid for, so there wasn’t a lot Olivia could complain about. Aside from how unprofessional it was.

  “Maybe she couldn’t find a place in town.” Stephanie was the kind of person who could see the bright side of anything, so her giving Hayley the benefit of the doubt wasn’t surprising. And just because Olivia was bent out of shape about the whole thing, that didn’t mean Stephanie had to feel the same way. Still, Olivia inexplicably wanted to hold on to her irritation a while longer.

  Customers entered through the front doors then, saving Olivia from letting loose with any snide responses she might have. She swallowed them down, put on a smile, and greeted the middle-aged couple crossing the lobby floor.

  She was going to have to find a way to suck this up.

  Chapter Three

  Hayley collapsed onto the king-size bed in the bedroom of her suite with a loud groan. She lay there, flat on her back, and let herself simply breathe. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this tired.

  The cell phone in her pocket rang, and she let it ring again before making a move to extricate and answer it. She knew it was Serena, right on time, as they’d texted only a few minutes ago. She hit the green button, put the phone on speaker, and stayed staring at the ceiling.

  “Hey.”

  “Are you alive?” Serena Winship asked, her voice laced with sarcasm.

  “Barely.”

  “Well, you’re talking, so I’m going to take that as a good sign.”

  “I’m sprawled on the bed in my room, and I’m not sure I can get back up again. I might just stay like this and sleep in my clothes.” The reality was, Hayley was only half-kidding.

  “One full day’s work did that to you? Oh, honey. You really are spoiled. Your father was right.” Serena had known Hayley since they were kids, and she was the only person in the world—besides Hayley’s dad—who didn’t let her get away with anything.

  Hayley gasped. “How dare you?”

  Serena laughed, then said, “Please. Suck it up, buttercup.”

  “You don’t understand,” Hayley whined. And it was a definite whine; she heard it herself. “I think my father’s trying to kill me.”

  “Sweetie, I think your father just wants you to step up.”

  Hayley let loose a huge sigh. “You’re supposed to cheer me up, not make me feel worse. That’s your job as the BFF.”

  “Another of my jobs as the BFF is to call you on your shit.” When Hayley didn’t argue, Serena went on. “Tell me about your day. Why are you so tired?”

  With a groan, Hayley forced herself to sit upright. With effort, she pushed herself off the bed and went out into the living area to find the room service menu, which she flipped through as she relayed her day to Serena. “I’m not physically tired so much as mentally. There’s so much to remember. I had a meeting with all my department heads this morning. First thing. How can there be so many departments in one place? I don’t even remember their names.”

  “That’s a piece of advice I’m happy to pass along: Learn their names. It’s important. They work for you. You need to know who they are. Plus, it makes it look like you give a damn.”

  More groaning from Hayley. “Everybody needs something in their department. And each thing costs money. And apparently, I have to come up with a budget. My assistant manager hates me, which we will come back to.” She dropped her chin to her chest and muttered, “Pretty sure my father wants me to fail.”

  “Then don’t.” Serena’s voice was firm. “I personally don’t think he wants you to fail—he loves you—but if that’s what you think, then prove him wrong.”

  “Easy to say. So much harder to do.”

  “Tell me why your assistant manager hates you. Which, by the way, I doubt is the case.”

  Hayley told Serena about the walk in the woods, meeting Olivia, the instant attraction, and the invitation to coffee. Then she told her how she’d shown up late and was pretty sure she’d taken a job Olivia thought might be hers.

  “I stand corrected,” Serena said with a chuckle. “She probably does hate you.”

  “Awesome. Thanks.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re not there to charm the mountain women. You’re there to show your father you deserve your money.”

  Hayley snorted a laugh. “The mountain women? Have I time traveled back to 1873?”

  “Hey, I’m a city girl,” Serena said with a chuckle. “I don’t know what people outside of that are called.”

  “They’re called people, you dumbass.”

  The laughter was good. It helped. A little.

  They chatted easily for a few more minutes, then hung up. Serena always put Hayley’s mind at ease, but tonight, she’d fallen a bit short. Not her fault, Hayley knew. She just couldn’t remember ever feeling this out of her element. It wasn’t a feeling she was used to. She could usually fake her way through something unfamiliar, but this? This was different.

  Her stomach rumbled loudly then, reminding her she hadn’t had anything but coffee all day, and she picked up the phone to order a cheeseburger, fries, and a beer.

  Olivia had her running around constantly. All day long. Meeting this person. Touring the entire resort. Checking out this room or that room. Pointing out guests. If Hayley had to guess, she’d say it was around 3:00 that afternoon when her brain had completely closed to any and all new information. Walls went up. Doors slammed shut. She simply could not absorb any more.

  Olivia seemed to understand, though she wasn’t happy about it.

  “Yeah, nothing about me made her happy,” Hayley whispered. “At least nothing after the walk.” Against her better judgment, she let herself remember how easy it had been to walk through the quiet of the woods and talk to Olivia about nothing in particular. How natural it had felt.

  The camera on the table caught her eye and she picked it up. Scrolling through the shots she’d taken that morning seemed to relax her just a bit. As a city girl, she wasn’t terribly familiar with the kind of natural peace she’d discovered that morning in the woods even before Olivia had come along. The stillness. The lack of car horns and motors and constant hum of conversation. There’d been nothing but the birdsong and the gentle movement of branches. Hayley took so many photos, some quite good. She kept scrolling until she came to the shots of Walter, Olivia’s dog. His black-and-white coloring and mismatched eyes—one blue, one brown—made him look like he belonged right there in the woods. He blended, looked like a natural part of his surroundings. She’d taken four or five shots, and after those came the ones she’d take
n of Olivia without her knowledge. The first one when she’d taken Walter’s face in her hands. Then she’d been stopped with Walter, letting him sniff, and Hayley was a few yards ahead. She hadn’t even thought about it, just lifted the camera and snapped a few shots. She couldn’t resist.

  The photos couldn’t have been more gorgeous, and one in particular made Hayley stop and stare at it, take it in. Olivia’s hair was all tucked up in her white hat, and that was unfortunate. At the same time, it gave the contours of her face center stage. And she had a beautiful face. Even now, looking at the photograph, Hayley swallowed hard. Olivia’s skin was olive-toned; she looked almost tan in the middle of November in the Northeast. Her eyes were big, slightly almond-shaped, and Hayley had never thought of brown eyes as having the possibility to be rich or deep or sensual, but Olivia’s were all three of those things. She was looking down at her dog, his face in her hands, but her eyes were still visible. Still breathtaking. Her lips were full, especially the bottom one, and very pink. Hayley wondered what they’d feel like against hers, then immediately shook herself free of the spell cast by the photo.

  “Jesus, Hayley, get your shit together,” she said aloud, and set the camera back down on the table. “Just because you haven’t had sex in…” She glanced up toward the ceiling as she tried to do math. “A really long time, that doesn’t mean it’s okay to fantasize about your assistant manager.”

  Although now that she thought about it, fantasizing was allowed, right? It wasn’t hurting anybody, and she was pretty sure that coffee date was now off the table. Olivia was certainly fun to look at, there was no denying that. She sighed as a knock on the door sounded and somebody called, “Room service.” She wished she could revisit Walking in the Woods Olivia instead of being a constant disappointment to Hates My Guts Olivia. As Hayley signed for her food, she wondered if she’d ever get to see that first version of Olivia again. The one in the woods. The one she’d asked out. The one who’d said yes.